Vitals (19 page)

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I picked out a Denny's. We would be powerless against any organization that could control all the fast-food restaurants in California.

Lissa had a bowl of clam chowder. I had a cheese omelet with sausage. Everything was thoroughly cooked.

THURINGIA, CALIFORNIA

We missed the turnoff twice. I looked at Rob's map and determined that Thuringia--if that was the unnamed dot in the red circle--lay between two little towns, Gillette Hot Springs and Cinnabar, about five miles off an old stretch of highway now used as frontage road and for backcountry access. But all we found east of Gillette Hot Springs were rolling brown hills and an abandoned restaurant complex with a decrepit green-and-white Dutch windmill.

We stopped for directions in Cinnabar, not much more than a gas station and a trailer park. The attendant at the station, a sixteen year-old boy with long black hair and a torn LA RAMS T-shirt, had never heard of Thuringia.

"This is the most boring place on Earth," he confided as he pumped gas into the Toyota. "Nothing but old-timers. Even the dogs are old."

Lissa was clearly unhappy but kept her mouth shut as I swore and fumbled with the map.

Finally I decided we should backtrack and stop at the old restaurant. We pulled into the weedy parking lot. I got out and peered through filthy and broken windows into a ruined interior, counters ripped up, trash on the floor. Around in back, in an angle of shade, I found a large, warped plywood sign leaning against two battered trash

cans. I flipped it with my foot and it fell over. In faded green mock Deutsche letters, outlined in powdery pink, the sign proclaimed:

ca fixwp (Elnmnftin

I shaded my eyes against the sun and walked across the cracked asphalt. A barricade, splintered and bleached by the sun, blocked a side road that ran straight off into the hills.

"Bingo!" I called out to Lissa in the car.

She did not share my excitement. '

The road to the hills had been turned into a washboard by years of sun and rain and neglect. Lissa pushed the Toyota along at about thirty miles per hour, our teeth rattling. "What do you hope to find?" she asked.

"I don't hope to find anything," I said. "Except maybe that it's all a dream." Utility poles lined the road. Power lines still served Thuringia, but it was no longer named on the map.

Lissa slowed to drive around a particularly deep pothole. "You think there's something bad here?" "I have no idea," I said. But the words on the banner in the news paper photo haunted me: SERVING AMERICA THE VERY BEST: THURINGIA NUTS FRUITS PASTRIES. I could picture ads in the back of National Geographic and Sunset in the 1950s: mail-order fruit and nut boxes from California.

"What if he made it all up?" Lissa asked hopefully.

"Then we'll just turn around and go on to San Jose. Confirm that Rob was wacko."

Lissa seemed to take what I said as a cue. She spoke rapidly. "The last trip we took, before we separated, Rob wanted to show me something in San Francisco. We drove all the way from Santa Monica to a salt farm in the South Bay. We took the Dumbarton Bridge and ended up on a dirt road on a levee. All around us were these big, square

lagoons filled with purple water. They were drying ponds for salt. Rob told me they were filled with bacteria, halophiles, he called them."

"Salt-loving," I said.

"I know that." She scowled but did not take her eyes off the road. "We stood by the car on the levee and it stank and there were flies everywhere. I wondered if I'd ever be able to use salt again. You know what he asked me?"

I could have sworn that she was leading me on, as if cross-examining a witness; that she already knew. Perhaps Rob had told her more, and she was trying to gauge the depth of my own knowledge. I shook my head.

"He asked me if I ever wondered what was the oldest mind on Earth."

"Oh, really?" I said.

"He pointed to the ponds. "There it is. I wonder what it's thinking right now," he said. "I wonder if it's mad at us?" That scared me. A long drive just to stare at some stinking ponds. We had a huge fight that night, and broke up a few weeks later. But I wasn't the one who filed for divorce. Rob did."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"What did he mean?" she asked.

"I suppose he meant that bacteria talk to each other."

"That's stupid," she said, then looked doubtful. "Do they?"

"Yes," I said. "But not the way we're talking now. They swap genetic material, plasm ids chemicals."

"Like in a brain?" Lissa asked.

"Maybe," I said.

"Doesn't that scare you? It scares me. If they hate us, there are so many of them, they'll win."

I shrugged. "Too many things scare me now," I said. "I try not to think about all of them at once."

Lissa braked the car abruptly and put the transmission into neutral. Ahead, in a flat stretch between the sun-yellowed hills, lay a low, brown, cornhusk of a town.

"Behold, the tourist mecca of Thuringia," I said.

The engine and air conditioner whined a precise Japanese chorus in the central valley heat.

"I don't want to do this," Lissa said, and her face was pale, her upper lip damp with nervous sweat.

"You can stay here, I'll walk in," I offered.

She thought that over. "No," she decided.

"We'll do it for Rob," I said.

"I've done a lot for Rob," she said, with a bitterness I hadn't heard before.

We both stared through the dusty windshield at the line of buildings, laid out in random clumps like a herd of drought-stricken cows.

Lissa put the Toyota back into drive and moved us slowly down the last hundred yards of rumpled asphalt. She pulled off and parked beside a chain-link fence held up by iron posts set in concrete and wrapped, for all we could tell, around the entire town. A sign clamped to the fence announced, in white letters on a red background, NATURAL POLLUTION SITE--OFF LIMITS. The fence crossed the road. There was no gate.

"What's that mean?" Lissa asked.

I puzzled it over. "The town east of here is called Cinnabar. That's an ore of mercury."

"Mercury is poison," Lissa said.

"Pretty nasty stuff," I agreed. "But I don't see how it could pollute a whole town. There's no factory or mine."

"Are we sure of that? I think we should turn around and go back."

It was a reasonable suggestion, but something told me the sign wasn't warning about mercury. "You stay here. I'll go look," I said. And added, "I promise I'll wipe my shoes off when I get back."

"The hell with that," Lissa said. "I'll go in with you." She tried to put on a brave face.

It wasn't difficult pushing through the old chain Jink. I found a rock and battered aside the link tension bar, then kicked it until there was a hole big enough to admit us. I slipped through without difficulty and decided to keep the rock, just in case. Lissa, in her dress, had

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an awkward moment that showed more thigh than either of us was comfortable with.

She straightened her clothes while I looked down the main drag of Thuringia. It resembled a ramshackle set for a cheap Frankenstein movie. Boarded-up buildings on either side had false fronts in European village style. The paint had been sunned down to a few hints of red and blue and green. The street was covered with dried mud and shallow gulleys from past rains and scattered with tumbleweeds.

"Tumbleweeds come from Russia," I said to Lissa.

"So?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said. We walked a few paces apart down the center of Saxony Boulevard. Some of the buildings had been marked with graffiti, but surprisingly few for this part of the country. To our left, down Bohemia Way, more ghostly shop fronts made old, phony promises.

We stood under a flaking golden kringle marking a Danish bakery. This shop had not been boarded, but the windows were long gone, and the interior was a dark, dusty ruin of bare shelves, exposed pipes, and electrical conduits poking out bare, dead wire.

Inside the display case lay a rain-wrinkled model of the town, all the color gone from the warped cardboard buildings. Next to a ripped out void on the north side of the model, a curled paper label read,

THURINGIA BAD EN BAD EN MINERAL SPRINGS AND SPA,

Natural Healing Waters From Deep in the Earth.

"Hot baths," Lissa said. "Bubbling death by fumes of mercury."

"Not funny," I said.

Two doors down, de laminating plywood covered a real-estate office window. Ye Olde Alpine Village Realty, announced quaint chiseled letters above the plywood. Blue-and-red trim, gingerbread with edelweiss cutouts. White America, with so shallow a history, was always looking for affirmation from more rooted cultures. Anywhere else it would have been simply ludicrous. Here, it made me grit my teeth.

"Had enough?" Lissa asked.

"Four or five more streets," I said.

For the next fifteen minutes, we walked through all the sad, desiccated dreams of a small and unsuccessful tourist town, reduced to bankruptcy and memories as bleached as the posters.

A bandstand stood in a small village square. It didn't take much to imagine oompah and polka music rising in the long summer nights.

The quiet was absolute. Not even a breeze blew through the old buildings. We passed a warehouse, doors yawning open, the concrete floor covered with broken pallets and mildewing heaps of burlap. In a narrow alley between two picturesque and thoroughly broken-down chalets lay an abandoned Ford sedan, stripped to body and frame. It had keeled over on a jack that had finally let go, after who knew how many decades.

Near the back of the town, separated from the other buildings, we found an office for the Thuringia Courier-Journal, a pretentious name for what I presumed was a one-sheet devoted to small-town flackery. I Still, the door had not been boarded, and I thought it might be worth a look inside.

"Think the sheriff will mind?" I asked. I prepared to make a run at it with my shoulder.

"That's stupid," Lissa said. "You'll break something."

I flexed my muscles. "Man of steel," I said. '

The wood was old and weak, and the door gave with one slam. Dust flew everywhere. Pulling down a triumphant fist, I stepped into the darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I stared at stacks of posters, boxes > filled with handouts, and a small gray desk. I

I carried a poster and pamphlet into the sunlight.

""Thuringia Farms, We ship everywhere,"" I read. '"Christmas, Thanksgiving, Any Holiday Occasion! World Famous Fruitcake, Walnut and Almond Baskets, Dried Fruit Samplers. Candified Oranges, Pineapple'--"

" "Candified'?" Lissa smirked.

"That's what it says. "Dates and Olives, Deluxe Pitted Prunes from California's Golden Hills. Satisfaction Guaranteed."" "Keeps you regular," Lissa said. ""Copyright 1950."" I held up the poster:

WELCOME TO PARADISE THURINGIA!

SUN AND SPA, THERMAL SPRINGS

HEALTHY LIVING

AMERICA'S NEW VIGOR CAPITAL

Female bathers in polite Esther Williams suits posed on rock walls and dipped their feet into a steaming pool. All smiles. Vigor and white teeth and fifties-style pillar thighs everywhere.

"Let's find the bathhouse," I suggested. "Looks sociable."

"Let's not and say we did," Lissa said. But the light words did not cover her pallor. She didn't like the place one bit. To me, it seemed sad and stupid but, so far, no cause for alarm.

The spa was a brick-and-stone blockhouse on the east end of town. Another run of chain link surrounded it, this time with a locked gate, and an even larger sign announced, NATURAL POLLUTION SITE. There was more detail in fine print:

WARNING.

DO NOT BATHE OR DRINK FROM SPRINGS.

CALIFORNIA STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH

And below that, in heavy block letters,

BACTERIAL CONTAMINATION.

"Curious?" I asked. "No," Lissa said.

I took the rock and whacked at the lock on the gate. It broke after three tries, and the gate opened with a shrill whine. Lissa followed a few steps behind.

The main entrance had been bricked up, but around the side, a service door sported another latch and lock. That one took five whacks. I grabbed the hanging lock and pulled the door wide, then peered into the darkness.

Inside water dripped and rushed. Sunlight fell in narrow shafts from gaps in boarded-up clerestory windows. Lissa touched my shoulder but said nothing. After a minute, my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. The air smelled sulfurous, as befitted a genuine hot spring.

"Phew," I said, and waved my hand to dispel not just the stench, but a nervous reluctance to look any further.

A brick walkway led to three steaming pools, the biggest about twenty feet long, all filled with dark, rippling water. A nine-inch pipe thrusting from the far wall spilled a continuous stream of hot water into the largest pool. The smaller pools took the overflow, where the water cooled to a temperature more comfortable for the uninitiated.

I knelt beside the smallest pool. A thick film coated the surface, forming yellow islands in the middle and scummy coastlines around the sloshing gutters. I swirled the film with my rock and lifted it to examine and smell. Foul, not algae but bacteria, probably distantly related to the floe at the bottom of the sea, and dying upon exposure to the air in the bathhouse.

I held the rock up to show it to Lissa, but she was no longer behind me. I stood and squinted into the shadows. Someone moved on the other side of the blockhouse. A ticking rose above the rush from the pipe: machinery, and still in working order. I thought I heard someone say something, broken syllables over the noise.

"Lissa?"

No answer. I walked around the pools and saw a large black box and a complex of pipes. Several of the pipes dropped into the big pool.

All were painted red. They looked newer than the bathhouse and were well maintained, dusted, polished.

Lissa came around the box and passed through a shaft of sun. Despite myself, I jumped.

"What?" she said.

I waved my hand feebly.

"It's steel," she said. "There's something inside, but I don't think you'll be able to burgle this one."